CITSEE Research Project

Interviews and Discussions

So the question as far as I'm concerned is that lots of people have now in a sense rejected that older type of social organisation, the social contract that you were talking about based on debt and consumption. And the reason I think a widespread demand for different ways of relating to others, relating to the community and dealing with power. So I'm optimistic about that. It seems to me you’d expect that whether or not the left in other parts of the world win elections, I think we've moved perhaps away from the model of the 1990s and the 2000s and a greater sense of community, of going back to certain common values and virtues and idea of the good, the public good, of the Commons, has returned. This is extremely hopeful.

‘Varieties of citizenship in a wider and more territorially differentiated Europe’ was a panel discussion organised as part of the CITSEE symposium ‘Varieties of Citizenship in Southeast Europe’ (6-7 June, 2013) in Edinburgh.

The question of organising reproduction in a cooperative way is especially important, because we cannot industrialise reproductive work, not at least the most laborious aspects of it, those related to childcare. This is my critiques of Marx and the Left when they dream of a society where the machines will do all the work. Machines cannot do child-care. Thus, there is a huge amount of work that cannot be technologised. The only way to organise it, then, is to make it more cooperative. The individualized, isolated way in which much reproductive work is organised is killing us. So the idea of care-communities has many dimensions. There is the dimension of survival, but there is also the prefiguration of a new society. There is also a dimension of resistance and there is the reconstruction of the social fabric.

My view is that what democracy should try to do is to create the institutions which allows for conflict - when it emerges - to take an agonistic form, a form of adversarial confrontation instead of antagonism between enemies. But when antagonisms already exist to transform them is of course is much more difficult but it's not impossible and I think one of the good examples is Northern Ireland. Because in Northern Ireland we had for a long time an antagonistic conflict between Protestants and Catholics. They were treating each other as enemies. Now since the Good Friday Agreement and with the institutions that have been created there is no more antagonism, there is an agonism. It doesn't mean that these people agree, they do disagree but they disagree in a way that they no longer see the other community as an enemy to be destroyed.

‘Why did they mobilise?’- a panel discussion on Social Struggles in Ex-Yugoslavia, a new book that explores the diverse forms of activist citizenship that have swept the region over the last few years. The discussion took place between contributors Boris Kanzleiter, the head of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Belgrade office, Andrea Milat, an activist and journalist from Croatia, Primož Krašovec, a Slovenian activist and theorist and its editor Michael G. Kraft. The discussion was chaired by Stipe Ćurković, the editor of the Croatian edition of Le Monde diplomatique, at the Subversive Forum in Zagreb in May 2013.

When I speak of artisans for incorporation I am referring to the fact that any period in the turbulent history of migrations in our diverse countries, there were always some members of the host community who believed in the project of incorporating the outsider. This was not just for charity but mostly to make membership more expansive. And whenever the outsiders were included, the host community benefited.

I think the European Union promised a great deal and delivered very little. Voting rights seem to have become totally irrelevant because whoever you elected, it didn’t matter which party, they were carrying out the same elite policies. Greece has made a difference and this will inspire people. But in order for that to happen you do need to have political instruments and political parties. It can’t just happen by occupying public spaces. You know, you need politics for that. And so what we are witnessing in Greece is, in a way, the reassertion of the political and I think that will be extremely important in saying ‘yes, we are citizens; we don’t just have, you know, basic rights. We have political rights and we want to exercise these political rights and link them to social and economic rights.'

Scholars around the world have joined with political activists to speak of citizenship being the general framework of human rights and a more equitable access to resources. In the US I think we have a legalistic understanding of citizenship, for the most part. Academics, of course, use citizenship to talk with other academics around the world about social rights. But most ordinary men and women in the United States think of citizenship in terms of documents – documents to be able to live and work in the United States. So citizenship, for me, reflects the concerns of my undergraduates and their families, many of whom are immigrants. Citizenship for me is a legal category.It is not the same as talking about social rights or the right to the city; it’s a legal understanding of national citizenship.